Forlagets egen omtale

The Sicilian Najdorf is one of Black’s best and most combative responses to 1.e4. The Najdorf was championed by Fischer and Kasparov during their respective periods of dominance over the world chess scene, and has been used extensively by many other World Champions and elite GMs, including Anand, Gelfand, Topalov and Vachier-Lagrave to name but a few.

Despite the Najdorf’s obvious pedigree, many players are intimidated by the highly tactical and theoretical nature of some of its main lines. In Playing the Najdorf, IM David Vigorito shows that this need not be a problem, as he offers a complete repertoire for Black based on positional principles, offering sound recommendations which lead to a fighting game without turning the battle into a memory contest.

David Vigorito is an experienced International Master and a respected chess author and coach, who has had the Najdorf as the backbone of his repertoire for most of his career, making him ideally qualified as a guide to this opening.

Fra forfatterens egen innledning:

The purpose of this book is to teach you how to play the Najdorf. Of course a lot of theory will be discussed, but there will always come a point where we are ‘out of book’ – be it move 25 or move 10 – and then we have to understand what we are doing.

I have been playing the Najdorf for about twenty-five years and teaching it for about a decade. Despite the fact that it has a reputation for being fantastically complicated and theoretical, I believe that at its heart it is a strategic opening, and that players of different styles can enjoy playing it and improve their chess while doing so. I have found that positional players adopting the Najdorf improve their tactical ability and feel for the initiative. Conversely, tactical players can develop their strategic play because there are so many recurring themes that arise from the typical pawn structures that one must master in order to successfully play the Najdorf.

When I was younger, I played the Sicilian Dragon for a long time, and it is still an opening that I have a strong attachment to. One advantage of the Dragon is that it is relatively simple to understand strategically. However, the drawback is that the strategy is also easy for your opponents! Everyone knows Fischer’s saying, “Open the h-file, sac, sac, mate.” So, if you are trying to outplay a lower-rated opponent, you may well have to achieve your objective tactically, because the strategic plans are so easily understood. Another disadvantage is that there are certain main lines (notably the Yugoslav Attack with 9.0–0–0) where Black is basically just trying to prove a draw.

Then along came the Najdorf. More specifically, along came Danny King’s Winning with the Najdorf. This book explained the Najdorf conceptually and helped me to realize that it was not all about the Poisoned Pawn Variation.